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Writing Quotes
"I like pens. My writing is so amazing there's never a need to erase."
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"Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it."
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"I took two years away from making films to write a novel."
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"Write about the dream you see during wakefulness."
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"A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy."
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"I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it."
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"Go on thinking that you don't need to be read and you'll find that it may become quite true: no one will feel the need tom read it because it is written for yourself alone; and the public won't feel any impulse to gate crash such a private party."
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"Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again."
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"Whenever I am sent a new book on the lively arts, the first thing I do is look for myself in the index."
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"In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity."
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"A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!"
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"Until you know who you are you can't write."
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"I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you."
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"Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard."
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"My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages."
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"A word only writes Its night and ridesIts dream."
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"I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away."
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"Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write."
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"After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months."
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"It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them."
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"The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning."
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"The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic."
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"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."
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"Of course the playing is important but writing and the establishing of what you are going for is prime too."
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"As far as modern writing is concerned, it is rarely rewarding to translate it, although it might be easy. Translation is very much like copying paintings."
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"Sometimes writing is running downhill, your fingers jerking behind you on the keyboard the way your legs do when they can't quite keep up with gravity."
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"I never do a full outline, and if I did, I would not feel bound to it, because the view from inside a scene can be different from the view outside it. But neither do I just start writing and see what happens; I am far more disciplined than that."
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"I think one of things is that all fantasy it seems to me works the way your brain basically works. This is perhaps a startling concept, but I think it's true."
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"I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay."
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"And eventually as I kept writing it, something emerged that was not quite me but a version of me."
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"The professionals are going to be joined by the average Joe. Everybody's a publisher."
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"I had to live this long, have the experiences I've had, to create what I do. I knew I wanted to write for years, but I had to be ready so I wouldn't blow it. The move to Maine was the final step."
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"The market for short stories is hard to break into, but a magazine editor isn't always looking for big names with which to sell his magazine - they're more willing to try stories by newcomers, if those tales are good."
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